The Thieves of Manhattan (12 page)

As Faye walked outside onto Fourth Street, on which a light rain had begun to fall, I froze on the stairs. Blade walked past me, taking two steps at a time, boots clacking, truth cross beating against his chest. I turned to see him look up at Anya and greet her with a smile, a peace sign, and a gruff “What up, dawg?”

Anya laughed. I wasn’t sure if she was laughing with or at Blade, until I saw the two of them making out on the stairs. Over Blade’s shoulder, Anya smiled at me, rolled her eyes, just as she had after Geoff Olden had introduced himself to her at
the KGB and given her a pair of business cards. But I took no comfort; Olden was now her
edgint
, Blade was her
luffer
, and I was
complittly
alone. I could hear Blade tell Anya that their “peeps was waitin’, yo” as I ran out into the rain.

Faye was already waiting at a bus stop, and once I caught up to her there, the M15 was approaching. Faye’s facial expression was sullen, more tired than angry, and it didn’t change when her eyes met mine.

“What’s the matter, Arch?” she asked. “Veronica split town?”

I smiled, but Faye didn’t smile back.

I desperately tried to explain, to apologize, to say that the night hadn’t gone as I had anticipated and what I really wanted to do was forget about it and start over. I said I knew I was a heel, but Faye wouldn’t even give me the satisfaction of acting angry. She just seemed disappointed, as if she now knew that I was no different from all the liars and cheaters she must have known before me. She’d dated guys like me, she said, guys who said they cared more about her than about getting famous, more about their art than about making money, but I was lying, maybe even to myself.

No, I told her, she had me figured all wrong. I did care about her, was still looking forward to seeing more of her art. I was searching for the one thing I could say that would break through to her, make her believe me, but in her eyes I could see that she had already boarded the bus, its doors had closed, and it was pulling away fast.

“Faye,” I said, looking at her pleadingly.

“Jigoku ni icchimae!”
she said, then called me
usotsuki
. But when the M15’s doors opened, she didn’t deem it worth
the trouble to speak to me in any language, not even English. She just slipped her MetroCard into the reader and walked to the back of the bus. When it began to move again, I could see her red hair and her baseball cap framed in a window. For a moment, it looked as though she might have been crying, but I figured it must have been the rain.

I could say that I felt as if I had just lost everything, but that wouldn’t be quite right, for it would imply I had something to lose. Instead, I now understood that I had had nothing in the first place—the stories I had been writing weren’t worth a damn. If someone on the street had come up to me and asked who I was and what I did, I wouldn’t have known what to say. There was a person I wanted to be, and a person I had been, but in between those two, I felt as if I were nobody at all.

The rain was beginning to fall harder. As I walked slowly back to Fourth Street, I took out my cellphone, removed a card from my wallet, and dialed the number that was printed on it. A recorded message informed me that my jury duty assignment for the following day had been canceled. No, not even the Appellate Court of New York County could distract me from my plight.

On the front steps of the KGB, the man I’d seen at the bar wearing a capote was skimming some pages and sipping a scotch. When he looked up and revealed himself to be Jed Roth, I can’t say I was surprised. I sat down on the steps next to Roth as if this was where I belonged, the place I always knew I would end up. Roth was skimming the manuscript of “After Van Meegeren,” which I hadn’t bothered to take with me after I had finished reading.

“It’s another good story, Ian,” Roth said. “But it’s just too quiet, too small. A quiet little story about people living quiet little lives. Tough to get anyone interested in it when the author doesn’t already have a name.”

I turned to Roth.

“So,” I said. “Tell me again how all this is supposed to work.”

Roth put down his glass.

“Right,” he said, “shall we begin?”

When we got back to his apartment, Roth acted differently than he had on our last night together—more focused, less patient; now that I seemed willing to follow him, he seemed to feel there was no need to turn on the charm. The apartment was brighter and less atmospheric than I remembered it. But the manuscript of
A Thief in Manhattan
was on his living room table, in the same spot where he had placed it after I’d flung it at him. A newly sharpened red pencil lay beside it.

When I sat down on the couch, Roth offered only water; when I asked for something stronger, he pointed to the coffeemaker.

“Just coffee or water? Those are my options?”

“Tonight, we’re working, Ian,” he said.

I took a glass of ice water.

I still had huge misgivings about Roth’s plan, but I needed distraction and a paying gig fast. Just about anything would have beaten waiting tables, tending bar, or pouring coffee; plus,
the money Roth was offering was better—a thousand daisies a week. I now figured that Roth was right about the stories I had been writing—they were too quiet, and if nothing else, working with an experienced editor like Roth might give me insight into bigger stories, where the stakes were higher. Probably Roth had also been right when he said that his plan really would draw attention to my work. Writers seemed to be getting rich plagiarizing stories or making them up; I’d spent the better part of a year saying the very same thing, boring Anya and Faye and whoever else would listen.

Still, as Roth sat across his coffee table from me, I kept asking questions, which he answered in clipped tones, as if I were wasting time.

“What if I change my mind about this?” I asked.

“Then you change your mind about it,” he said.

“So, the thing is, you won’t let me tell anybody,” I said.

“You can tell anyone anything you please, Ian,” said Roth.

“Anything?”

“Like what? Like Jed Roth gave you his old novel and asked you to put your name on it and pass it off as your memoir?”

“So that’s it,” I said. “You don’t think anyone would believe me.”

Roth shrugged. I could see he didn’t care. I wondered if I could ever say anything that would faze him, if I would ever ask him a question and he wouldn’t know the answer.

“But what about my stories?” I asked.

“We’ll get to that,” said Roth.

“So that’s not really part of your plan.” I informed him that finding a good publisher for my stories was the only reason I was even considering working with him.

But Roth said the plan remained the same, had always been and would always be the same. I would make Roth’s story my own, it would be published, and then I would declare it all to be a lie. And after the ensuing scandal, everyone would want to read the stories that were really mine. But that was step five, and what was the point of discussing step five when we hadn’t gotten through the first four?

“So, what’s step one?” I asked.

“Read it,” he said, tapping the manuscript of
A Thief in Manhattan
with the fingers of one hand.

“We already did that one,” I said.

“You remember it?”

When I said I more or less did, he asked me to tell him the plot. I was bad with plots and it took only a minute for me to recount what I remembered—guy walks into a library filled with rare, valuable manuscripts; sees a girl admiring a famous old book,
The Tale of Genji;
observes some hooligan librarian stealing manuscripts; follows him to the office of a foul-mouthed manuscript appraiser who’s fencing the documents; realizes he might be able to steal a document himself without being suspected; sneaks into the library and rips off the
Genji
for the girl; returns to the library one final time. The girl isn’t there, and the place has burned down. Cat and mouse; cloak and dagger; chase, chase, chase, until the librarian and appraiser catch up to the guy outside Manhattan in the desolate field where the book has been buried beneath a golden cross. In the end, the guy shoots the librarian and appraiser, catches the 8:13 train, goes off to the site of the library, finds the girl. End of story.

I thought I got the plot pretty much right and was actually feeling rather smug about it, but Roth regarded me with contempt,
then pelted me with questions—well, did I remember the name of the library?

No, I said.

Did I remember that the Hooligan Librarian was named Norbert Piels? That Iola Jaffe was the manuscript appraiser? That her office was located on Delancey Street? Did I remember the street address?

Did I at least remember the name of the narrator of the story? he asked. The name of the thief?

No, I said.

Well, then he’d give me a little hint, Roth said—the name was Minot. He spelled it out for me. I-A-N M-I-N-O-T. This was my story now, he said.

And then he picked up his red pencil, crossed out “A Novel by Jed Roth” on the title page, and replaced it with “A Memoir by Ian Minot.”

I wanted to move on to step two as quickly as possible, but in the first weeks, Roth seemed to view his main responsibility as being to slow me down. Rushing smacked of desperation, he said, and the only thing that could jeopardize the plan was trying to reach the end of it too fast. The project couldn’t be a simple matter of putting my name on a manuscript he’d written, and then, at the appointed time, revealing that it was false—I had to know the whole story inside and out as if I had written it myself.

To ensure that I would work at his pace, he paid me by the hour, not the job, which would be over only when he said it was. I was to edit just three pages a day, and retype them myself; as long as I maintained his basic story and characters, I could change as much or as little as I wanted.

I arrived at his apartment between nine and ten every morning, and worked at the computer in his office—a spare, clean nook with good light, a desk, a comfortable swivel chair, and a view of the park. Roth left me alone most of the time. I would stay until five, and he was usually back by then, sometimes sipping a takeaway cup of tea from my former place of employment. He’d look over the pages I had copied and printed out, then pay me in cash.

In the beginning, I worked as little as possible on the story, typed the pages fast right when I got to Roth’s place, changing little other than the occasional comma or phrase, after which I worked on editing my own stories. Then I’d gaze out at the snow falling on Riverside, or snoop through Roth’s belongings, curious whether I might learn something he hadn’t told me. But I found nothing that contradicted his stories—on his shelves were copies of books he had edited alongside some of his favorite classics. In his drawers, none of which were locked, were marked-up manuscripts he had worked on; there were files of financial documents that went back nearly a decade, pay stubs from Merrill Books, holiday cards from Francine Prose and Miri Lippman, photos of Jed with Jim Merrill, Jr., during happier days, copies of some of Jed’s early stories with long, evocative titles (“A Desolate Field, Beneath a Golden Cross”; “Blood Is Thicker Than Nothing”) that he’d placed in magazines and literary journals.

At the end of my workday, when Roth would look over my manuscript pages, he wouldn’t ask why it had taken eight hours for me to finish, just, “Are you sure that’s all you want to do?” or “You’re certain you like it just the way I wrote it?” I would shrug and say yes, but by the end of the week, I was getting bored, both with the job and with Roth’s story, which was thinner than I remembered. Though the plot remained amusing, the characters were too broad and lacking in substance. Roth didn’t seem to give a damn about the people in his book; I couldn’t empathize with any of them. Iola Jaffe was a foul-mouthed harpy; Norbert Piels, an illiterate dunce; the Girl in the Library was a schoolboy’s fantasy; Roth’s hero was too suave and unflappable to be believed. I had trouble deciding whether to make changes or to leave everything just as Roth had written it and get on with my own work. The more I looked at how long it would take to complete the book at this pace of three pages a day, the more I started to add details—a line of dialogue I’d overheard, a little descriptive flourish, backstories for each character.

As the days drew on, I spent more time on
A Thief in Manhattan
, less on my own work; if I was really going through with this plan, then I wanted the narrator’s voice to be my own. Roth’s manuscript didn’t offer many details about his lead character, who had been named Roth but had little in common with the man I saw every day. His Roth seemed more sketch than fully realized human being, as if a screenwriter had created him, uncertain of who would wind up playing the role in the movie.

I began adding details from my own life—I gave the novel’s hero not only my name but my history: a childhood in a tiny, rural Indiana hamlet between Terre Haute and Indianapolis, a
law-student mother who died young, a deceased librarian father. I gave him a hot Eastern European ex-girlfriend, too, and when it came to describing the Girl in the Library, I made her a sexy smart-ass with a baseball cap, boots, paint-spattered jeans, red hair, a concert jersey, and the tattoo of a twilight flower on a shoulder. For one of the chase scenes, I even used my knowledge of the freight trains that used to pass through my hometown.

I began to work longer hours and Roth paid me for overtime. I took research field trips, went to the New York Public Library microfilm reading room, where I studied whatever I could track down about the history of the Blom Library. I couldn’t find much—a 1951 piece about the library’s history; items about various accidents that had struck the library over the years; obituaries from the
Times
for Chester and Cecille Blom; an “Also Worth Noting” listing in a 1974 travel piece about “Undiscovered New York,” and then the Metro pieces about the Blom fire, which hewed to the story Roth had already told me, that arson had been suspected but never confirmed, and that the most valuable manuscripts—the first editions, the Shakespeare folios,
The Tale of Genji
—had been destroyed. One afternoon, I took a taxi from Roth’s apartment to the site of the Blom Library on Lexington to see the condo building that had replaced it. The trips didn’t help me to add much to the manuscript, but the story did begin to feel more real and true, the characters more sympathetic.